


The Darkness & the Devil

by fulminating_gold



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Drabble, Ficlet, Freeform if you squint, Implied Masturbation, Internalized Homophobia, John Irving's religious guilt vs. the temptation of a fine piece of ass, M/M, Repression, Rip to Lt Little's cold ears, Sexual Tension, What happens in the hold stays in the hold
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 14:40:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29137200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fulminating_gold/pseuds/fulminating_gold
Summary: Irving narrowly avoids having to confront the temptation Mr. Hickey presents to him.
Relationships: Cornelius Hickey & Lt John Irving, Cornelius Hickey/Lt John Irving
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	The Darkness & the Devil

**Author's Note:**

> This little guy was originally supposed to be a submission for Terror Rarepair Week, but I have since learned that my boys are an ineligible ship, so I'll just sacrifice it to the ether now. Good day to all my fellow rat bastards who've written so many fics for this crusty ship that they no longer count as a rarepair.

By the time Little relieves Irving as officer of the watch, Irving’s fingers are frozen inside of his gloves, and he has to continually flex them to ensure they haven’t numbed. The Arctic night spreads before him like a blank gessoed canvas, dark as pitch with only the occasional swell of blue indicating a distant pressure ridge bucking up into the sky. There is no aurora borealis tonight; it is too late in the year for them – or too early, depending on your perspective. Irving can feel his eyes straining to make out discernible shapes against the amorphous black, his mind struggling to make sense of the emptiness.

He is getting better at it, but he often leaves watch duty with a headache.

Little appears behind him with no warning – they have stopped sounding the bells since the creature’s last appearance – and his presence is startling. He moves quietly, his boots hardly making a sound on the packed-down snow covering the deck. Irving jumps, but Little does not seem to notice.

“Eight bells,” he says, his voice coming out in a white plume around his face. “I’m relieving you for the morning watch.”

“Thank the Lord,” says Irving, stepping back from the quarterdeck railing to let Little take his place. “I’m about frozen through.”

Little scoffs. “Not much better below,” he says. “They’ve cut back on the boilers again – we’re running short on coal, it would seem, if we want to have any left over when the leads open up.”

“Captain’s still entertaining that fantasy, then?” Irving says. The words slip out before he can stop them, and he just barely catches the look of surprise and disapproval as it flits across Little’s face. Irving clears his throat and shuffles out of the way, rubbing his frozen hands together.

“Well,” he says. “I’ve nothing to report; it’s been an uneventful night, so if you’ll excuse me, sir, I’ll just –”

He pauses and waits for Little’s approval; he is, after all, still Irving’s superior. Little looks for a moment as if he wants to say something, but the exhaustion in his face is plainly readable, and he finally jerks his head in dismissal. Irving ducks out of the way, scurrying down the hatchway to the lower deck and the relative warmth it provides.

The ship is quiet at this hour – aside from the changing of the watch, there’s little activity and few bodies in Irving’s way as he makes for the wardroom. A change of clothes and a few hours’ rest; that is all he wants, all his mind is engaged in thinking about as he hurries down the narrow corridors, barely acknowledging his fellow officers with a short nod here and there. He hardly notices when one of the petty officers appears before him, knuckling his forehead with a mittened hand.

“Lieutenant Little’s respects, sir,” says the boy, “and would you please be so kind as to fetch him a spare wig while you’re still in your slops, sir? He says he’s forgotten his.”

Irving starts at the boy’s appearance, and then deflates as his mind processes the request. His bones ache with cold and all he wants is to collapse into his berth, but this – it is such a small thing, and he is not entirely thawed out yet anyway.

He sighs. “Thank you, Johnson. Tell Lieutenant Little I’ll be up directly.”

“Sir.” Johnson knuckles his forehead again and ducks past Irving. Casting a longing glance at the corridor leading to the wardroom and his warm berth, Irving sniffs and turns on his heels, backtracking towards the main hatchway going down to the hold.

The ropes are cold on Irving’s fingers as he descends, and he shivers at the aggressive drop in temperature from one deck to the next. When he finally drops down into the hold, he can see his breath, and little else.

There is a lantern hanging by the ladder. Irving takes it, squinting as he holds it aloft and picks his way between the crates and canvas-covered barrels. The scuttling of little feet indicates rats – how they have survived these temperatures, Irving cannot fathom, but he mentally applauds their hardiness. _They might just outlive us,_ he thinks.

Extra slops are located at the back of the hold, in a little closet hopefully out of reach of the vermin. Irving makes his way back to it, his little pool of lantern-light swinging in the darkness, but as he nears it he stops, sensing something out of place – warmth, another human presence. He blinks, peering round his lantern.

“Hello?”

A slight scuff of movement, and an exhalation. Irving’s fingers flex around the lantern handle, stiff with cold. He swallows, summoning a stronger voice.

“Who’s back there? Come out, show yourself.”

A second, louder shuffle, and another light appears from behind a crate of tins. A narrow, compact figure detaches itself from the cargo and Irving recognizes it instantly – recognizes it with a deep wrench in the pit of his stomach that makes him wish it had not been a human he’d discovered down here. The figure raises its lamp, bathing the familiar face in sallow light. He grins, dipping his head in a mockery of the usual formal greeting.

“Lieutenant Irving,” says Mr. Hickey.

Irving works his jaw, his mind already racing to conclusions regarding what the caulker’s mate could be doing down in the hold at such an hour. It isn’t difficult to fill in the blanks – Irving had caught him once before. His eyes automatically dart down to the crates, searching for another human form, but he senses only one.

“What are you doing down here, Mr. Hickey?” he demands, lifting his chin.

Hickey shrugs his shoulders, hoisting up a box of tools to show Irving.

“There’s a draft in the petty officers’ mess,” he says. “I’m just on my way to fix it.” His sharp eyes glint in the lamplight, twinkling brightly against the sleek planes of his face. “What are _you_ doing down here, Lieutenant?”

Heat rises to Irving’s cheeks; miraculous, given the cold. He tosses back his head and makes the ungainly trek across the room to the slops closet, where he yanks free a Welsh wig for Lieutenant Little. He holds it up by way of an explanation before abruptly remembering that he need not explain himself to a subordinate.

Hickey nods, worrying the inside of his cheek. “Right,” he says. “Gotta keep warm, eh?”

Irving sniffs. “It’s for Lieutenant Little,” he says haughtily.

A flash of teeth in the dark, and Hickey advances a step, shrugging the collar of his coat into place. “You look as though you could do with a good warming yourself,” he says. “On your way up to your berth, I should hope.”

Irving stiffens, anger rising in him at the implications of the speech. His mind flashes, unbidden, back to that day in the boiler room, the glint in Hickey’s eyes as he’d stepped out from the shadows, tucking his shirt back in. Smiling like a boy caught with his hand in a candy jar. Challenging Irving, daring him to admit to what he’d witnessed. Inviting him to imagine it.

Irving will be damned before he’ll admit that he _has_ imagined it. That is a secret kept between himself and the ice – an ugly truth that will remain frozen in this desolate place long after the ships have been blasted to atoms by the pressure ridges and swallowed by the fathomless depths. Hickey, most certainly, will never know that Irving thinks of him in the dark.

Hickey is advancing on him now. He sets his lantern down and places the toolbox gently beside it, slowly rubbing his hands together.

“You’ve been avoiding me of late, Lieutenant,” he says, tilting his head up to meet Irving’s gaze. “Strange, as you used to be so keen on watching me. Keeping an eye on the odd ones, eh?”

“Get along, Mr. Hickey,” Irving manages to choke out, clenching his fingers around the wig in his hand. He moves to step around Hickey, but Hickey moves with him, closing the distance between them in a single, fluid stride. Irving jerks back as suddenly Hickey’s face is directly before his, hovering and pinning him with that disturbingly direct gaze. It is the same gaze Irving has seen in his dreams, glaring at him from the dark places. Hovering over him, close enough to touch –

A shiver passes through Irving, raising gooseflesh along his arms that has nothing to do with the cold. “Move aside, Mr. Hickey,” he says.

Hickey does not move. He cocks his head like a bird, studying Irving, sizing him up. His gaze skims the features of Irving’s face, gliding over him like water, pressing his skin like a physical touch. Irving exhales shudderingly; the clouds of their breath mingle. Irving thinks of the breaths he heard that day, the ones he has replayed in his mind like recitations; the sharp, halting exhalations of exertion, from Hickey and Gibson both, edged with sounds made at the back of the throat, made in passion.

They are not unlike his own sounds, the ones he pretends he does not make, when he closes his eyes and sees Hickey’s face behind his eyelids, feels his hand instead of Irving’s own slipping down the front of his trousers.

Hickey’s gaze drops, then lifts. He smiles, and something sparks in Irving, deep in his center.

“We’re all alone down here, Lieutenant,” he says softly, a hand just brushing the sleeve of Irving’s coat. “If there’s something you need to tell me –” The hand shifts, moving across Irving’s stomach with a touch very nearly imperceptible. “—You ought to do it now.”

Irving’s breathing hitches – a fatal mistake. He wants to extricate himself, but he is frozen in place; caught between the darkness and the devil with nowhere to run. There is a part of him – the part he hates – that hears and acknowledges Hickey’s words; they are indeed alone, safe from the prying eyes above. If he were to make one movement, one gesture of submission…

“We’re not so different, you and I, Lieutenant” Hickey muses, tracing his fingers lower along Irving’s coat-front. “We’re neither of us the type to miss an opportunity.” He looks up at Irving through his lashes, like a woman peering up from behind a fan. There is that shiver again, an electric spark traveling right through from Hickey’s fingertips to the center of Irving’s body. He opens his lips, whether to speak or simply breathe, he does not know. Hickey’s eyes glint in the lamp-light, as cold and calculating as the ice.

Footsteps sound above, and cold floods back into Irving, yanking him back from the precipice. _Thank you, merciful God,_ he thinks as he swallows his shame.

“I said, move aside, Mr. Hickey.” His voice is firmer than he’d expected it to be.

Hickey hesitates; seems to consider. Irving trembles as he stands firm, waiting for his order to be obeyed. Finally, Hickey stands aside.

“Better get that to Lieutenant Little quickly,” he says, gesturing to the wig clenched in Irving’s fist. “Before his ears drop off.” He drops his fingers from Irving’s coat, rubbing them together as if removing some filth. Irving pushes past him, taking care not to make contact, and hurries out to the hatchway and back onto the upper deck.

The darkness presses hotly at his back as he makes his retreat.


End file.
